Call for papers: ICT skills and economic opportunities for marginalized groups

he Journal of Information Technologies and
International Development (ITID) invites
submissions for a special issue titled ICT goes to work:
Skills and economic opportunities for marginalized groups.

New Submission deadline: April 14th.
Please visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/itid
for more information about ITID, its author
guidelines, and to submit a paper for this issue.
When submitting the paper please indicate
in the field "comments to the editors" that it
is for the ICT skills and employability special issue

Guest editors :
Christopher T. Coward and Maria Garrido
(Center for Information & Society,
ICT and Development Group, University of Washington)
and Akthar Badshah (Community Affairs, Microsoft Corporation)

A fundamental premise of ICT and international development
is that people equipped with basic ICT skills
should be more employable than those
without these skills, and in turn have access
to increased economic opportunities.
Many nongovernmental organizations, telecenters in
particular, state that improving the economic
livelihood of their communities is one of
their most important missions.
Many training programs from donor and public-supported
to privately operated, have been built with the
express purpose of providing the people
who come into the centers with
the basic skills they need to be hired
by a local company, obtain a better-paying job,
or start a microenterprise.

This special issue on ICT goes to work:
Skills and economic
opportunities for marginalized groups
invites papers that address this topic with
novel, theoretically grounded,
and methodologically sound research. We
will also accept a limited number of
practitioner submissions. Papers
may address the following questions, for example:
*       To what extent does having basic ICT skills affect an
individual's employment prospects (e.g., quantitative analyses of income
differentials, numbers and types of jobs that are available)?
*       Have basic ICT skills positively affected microenterprise
creation?
*       How does gaining ICT skills affect employability compared with
gaining other types of skills (e.g., learning English, learning how to
search for jobs)?
*       What are the approaches and outcomes of different training
programs?
*       What government policies and other factors influence
employability?

This special issue is primarily concerned with basic ICT skills (e.g.,
computer fundamentals, productivity applications, employment sector
specific applications) and programs targeting marginalized populations,
not with the advanced engineering skills needed for employment in, for
instance, the IT export service sector.

The topic of this ITID special issue is inherently multidisciplinary.
The editors welcome a diverse pool of submissions from fields such as
economics, development communications, education, rural sociology,
engineering, and public policy.

Information Technologies and International Development (ITID) is the
leading journal focusing on the intersection of information and
communication technologies (ICT) with international development. ITID is
published by the MIT Press and edited at the University of Southern California
and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

If you have any questions related to this special issue, please
contact:

Maria Garrido, PhD
Research Associate
ICT and Development Program
Center for Information & Society
University of Washington
www.cis.washington.edu/ictd
P. 1 (206) 685 08 12

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